Ingrammar andlinguistics, apolarity item is alexical item that is associated withaffirmation or negation. An affirmation is apositive polarity item, abbreviatedPPI or AFF. A negation is anegative polarity item, abbreviatedNPI or NEG.
The linguistic environment in which a polarity item appears is alicensing context. In the simplest case, an affirmativestatement provides a licensing context for a PPI, while negation provides a licensing context for an NPI. However, there are many complications, and not all polarity items of a particular type have the same licensing contexts.
As examples of polarity items, consider theEnglish lexical itemssomewhat andat all, as used in the following sentences:
As can be seen,somewhat is licensed by the affirmative environment of sentence (1), but it is forbidden (anti-licensed) by the negative environment of sentence (4).[1] It can therefore be considered to be a positive polarity item (PPI). On the other hand,at all is licensed by the negative environment of sentence (2), but anti-licensed by the positive environment of sentence (3), and is therefore considered a negative polarity item (NPI).
Because standard English does not have negativeconcord, that is,double negatives are not used to intensify each other, the language makes frequent use of certain NPIs that correspond in meaning to negative items, and can be used in the environment of another negative. For example,anywhere is an NPI corresponding to the negativenowhere, as used in the following sentences:
Note that double-negative constructions likeI was not going nowhere take on an opposing meaning in formal usage, but that this is not necessarily the case in colloquial contexts and in variouslects, which parallels other languages which have negative concord.Anywhere, like most of the other NPIs listed below, is also used in other senses where it is not an NPI, as inI would go anywhere with you.
See alsoEnglish grammar § Negation, andAffirmation and negation § Multiple negation.
The actual set of contexts that license particular polarity items is not as easily defined as a simple distinction between affirmative and negative sentences. Baker[2] noted thatdouble negation may provide an acceptable context for positive polarity items:
However, licensing contexts can take many forms besides simple negation/affirmation. To complicate matters, polarity items appear to be highly idiosyncratic, each with its own set of licensing contexts.
Early discussion of polarity items can be found in the work ofOtto Jespersen andEdward Klima. Much of the research on polarity items has centered around the question of what creates a negative context. In the late 1970s, William Ladusaw (building on work byGilles Fauconnier) discovered that most English NPIs are licensed indownward entailing environments. This is known as theFauconnier–Ladusaw hypothesis. A downward entailing environment, however, is not a necessary condition for an NPI to be licensed—they may be licensed by somenon-monotone (and thus not downward entailing) contexts, like "exactly N," as well.
Nor is a downward entailing environment a sufficient condition for all negative polarity items, as first pointed out by Zwarts (1981) for Dutch "ook maar."
Licensing contexts across languages include the scope of n-words (negativeparticles, negativequantifiers), theantecedent ofconditionals,questions, therestrictor of universal quantifiers, non-affirmative verbs (doubt), adversative predicates (be surprised), negativeconjunctions (without),comparatives andsuperlatives,too-phrases, negative predicates (unlikely), somesubjunctivecomplements, some disjunctions,imperatives, and others (finally, only). Given that many of these environments are not strictly downward entailing, alternative licensing conditions have been proposed building on concepts such asStrawson entailment andnonveridicality (proposed byZwarts andGiannakidou).
Different NPIs may be licensed by different expressions. Thus, while the NPIanything is licensed by thedownward entailing expressionat most two of the visitors, theidiomatic NPInot lift a finger (known as aminimizer) is not licensed by the same expression.
While NPIs have been discovered in many languages, their distribution is subject to substantial cross-linguistic variation; this aspect of NPIs is currently the subject of ongoing research incross-linguistic semantics.[3]